


The Dæmons of the Winchesters

by TheMermaidLord



Series: The Dæmons of Supernatural [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergence, Dæmons, Gen, all names are from a baby names website, has this been done?, hopefully, i don't know how long this will take, most mean something, no relationships - Freeform, probably, the title pretty much says it all, this will be a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 04:32:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4732913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMermaidLord/pseuds/TheMermaidLord
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winchester's dæmons. Adam isn't included because I don't know how to write Adam. Mild angst. No actual His Dark Materials characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mary and John

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a series, each work having two or three chapters. Let's just see how it goes.
> 
> All of the chapters are quite short, but hopefully will be getting longer? Depends how lazy I am.

**Mary and Doluin**

Sam doesn't remember his mother's dæmon. He knows what it was, of course, a sleek white hare named Doluin, because Dean has told him, and John too, when he can be persuaded to talk, which is never. He has an imagined picture in his head, of a quick, clever thing, a flash of white around a table, and it's surprisingly accurate, but not quite right, of course.

Mary's hare had green eyes, the vibrant colour of crushed emeralds, a body lean and thin to the point of starvation, and hidden battle scars, where even John had never seen them.

Mary's hare had taken his form age eleven, knocking the knife out of the hand of a demon going for his partner. He had been flung across the narrow alley, and Mary had gasped, but she was safe, and the demon fled. Doluin allowed himself to be scooped up, and found he was just the right size to fit against Mary's breast, and he was too tired to pretend to mind.

Mary's hare had been kicked, and scratched, and manhandled in just about every way, and not all of it by dæmons. When you hunted, right and wrong blurred together, for monsters had no dæmons and didn't abide by the unspoken rules, and demons had no souls, and no cares, and no morals, and if you weren't prepared to fight dirty you shouldn't bother fighting at all.

 Mary's hare was quick, and fast, and heavily sarcastic, and seemed to give the air of a superior, a sense of 'don't you know who I am?' To most people this seemed laughable - this ragged white flash being important, having seen anything more than horror movies in the dark and stolen kisses, but a few times Mary had ran across someone from her past, and they didn't laugh. They would have known about the scars and what they meant.

Dean's dæmon had caught a glimpse of them once, only a few weeks before the incident, but Doluin had blamed spurned suitors of Mary, years ago, and watched her flap off in the guise of a butterfly with an unreadable expression. Dean tries to convey these things, but he's forgetting them too, though he refuses to say so, and Sam gives up. He'll never know them, not properly.

_But that doesn't mean he can't miss them_.

If Mary was to see the life her sons had now, she would weep, and rage at her husband, and curse into the wind. Doluin would have been sitting in her arms, silent and mourning, and thinking about two little boys and their dæmons, lost, alone, and scared.

**John and Alassa**

Alassa stayed a puppy for a long time. When she could change, she spent time as a puppy. When she finally settled, age 13, as a white pit bull with blue eyes and a huge, smiling mouth, and a complete misunderstanding of sarcasm, she was still a puppy. Even when John grew up, and she matured and grew, and they met Mary and Doluin, she could hold an intelligent conversation while still acting like an overgrown puppy. John acted as her father figure half the time, but they both looked out for each other. All that changed when Mary came along.

Mary and John were each other's world. Suddenly Alassa wasn't the most important thing anymore, and she didn't like it. But she would make the best of it for John's sake, because she would do anything for him. Doluin treat Alassa with a sort of cold aloofness, at first. Doluin didn't understand this newcomer, and he understood everything. They had nothing in common. Was this what love was, for dæmons?

While they couldn't have guessed of Cupid's spell, at the same time both of them understood that this wasn't how it was meant to be. While Mary and John led a simple life of care and love together, Doluin and Alassa felt something was wrong. And it was, of course, but they were peaceful, and happy, after a while, and isn't that all that matters? Doluin lived the rest of his life with an overgrown puppy who seemed to have something against letting people know she was actually intelligent. Alassa lived the happiest part of hers with a hare who seemed to have taken on the greater part of the worlds burden, and said things Alassa didn't always understand.

_Then, of course, there was a fire and screaming, and Alassa had to learn to grow up._

Now her white coat is scabby and slashed and hinted with grey, and her teeth are long and chipped. She doesn't talk so much any more, except to John, and then mostly to stop him drinking. There's not even anyone left to note how their positions have changed. When John sells his soul, she's still there, snapping at his heels, where she's always been. Alassa goes into death wearily, lying down and hurting but resigned, thinking of a little white hare who she learned to love, wondering if he went out kicking and screaming, and she's not a puppy anymore.

Had they lived, and she could have watched those two boys ripping up the rule book, and stopping the damn apocalypse and the leviathans and the Darkness and anything else the universe found to throw at them, maybe she could have been a puppy again.


	2. Dean and Sam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Dean's dæmons, and the stories of how they took their form. As nice as it would have been to make them smol and cuddly, I resisted.

**Dean and Riva**

Riva picks a form, finally, when Dean is thirteen. Before now she's been everything, flying and running and tunnelling and never once staying still. When they were little, Riva liked small forms. Butterflies as big as your head, in the hues of an autumn day. Vivid green beetles with wings like the fairies. Huge fluffy bumblebees, yellow as the sun and black as night, although she never _did_ find out how to make honey.

After the incident, when they're on the road, still with no idea about the things that creep in the corner of their vision or things that go bump in the night, Riva won't change as much. She'll be a tiny moth on the car window or a cat curled up in Dean's lap. When they become the ones raising Sam, she'll hang as a bat from the roof of the motel to make him laugh, or tell him stories as each of the parts in turn. Sam's dæmon eventually starts speaking again, certainly before Sam does, and they do it together. Even Dean will chip in, the three of them stuck in an endless charade to pretend everything's okay.

Learning that what they're after is a demon, and not the only one, strikes a change in Riva. She's never been overly talkative, but a lot of the time they didn't need to talk. Now is different. She'll practice changing, so quickly the human eye can't follow. She'll fly, so far up it starts to hurt, and Dean yells for her to come down. In a fight, she doesn't even hesitate before launching herself at the ghoul, Dean proud of her but also scared. He feels like she's slipping away, like he's losing her as he's lost almost everything else. It's not until years later that she begins to calm down, and finally takes the form she's always been meant to have.

They've been hunting, and have just got back, and Dean is putting Sammy to bed for what seems like the millionth time. In years and years of a hard, painful life of killing, sometimes it seems like his little brother is the one he's truly in it to protect. Dean has an arm in a sling and a messily stitched up chest, raked by some unspeakable monster that now lives is a shallow grave. When he looks over Riva is curled up on the floor as a wolfdog, and that's all she'll ever be. Dean knows this, in a way he can't describe, and their eyes meet and he smiles, the first time in quite a while.

He all but runs to John, in the next room, and managed to get out a garbled mess of language, which his dad somehow translates and grunts at.

"Huh. She'll be decent for hunting."

When Sam wakes up the next day and sees Riva, he screams a little inside his mouth, and hugs Dean, and praises her every aspect all morning until ever John smiles, and Dean is okay.

**Sam and Mallika**

Dad isn't around when Sam's dæmon becomes who she is. That's because with the first monster Sam ever kills, he isn't there.

John has sent Dean on some sort of test, to prove himself, as if he needs to. It's been done a million times before, but this time, something is wrong. Sam knows it. He also know the answer he'll get when he tells Dad this, so he bites his tongue and leaves through the window.

They're in a new neighbourhood today, some town right on the border of Canada, and it's cold. Sam's jacket is in the other room, where John is, so Mallika becomes an ermine, large and sleek and white and wraps herself around his skinny chest. He slides the window shut behind him, because by the time he's back Dad will have noticed, and there's no point trying to hide. 'If you come back' says the voice that speaks like Alassa when she's in one of her moods, where nothing can be good in the world. Sam shakes his head and runs.

Usually his dæmon would be cautious but today she's egging him on, as aware of the danger as he is. Sam's tearing through the streets, car horns honking, fully aware of the fact he doesn't know where he is, but Mallika does. Suddenly she turns from an ermine beside him to a tawny lioness racing ahead of him, and it's all he can do to keep up. Sam doesn't ask how she knows where to go, just runs, and in his scramble to save Dean he doesn't even think about the lioness until her head turns to him and his heart swells because _this is who she's meant to be_.

When he can't run any more she takes him on her back, she's not nearly the size of a true lioness but he's scrawny and they're both so full of adrenalin they could topple the world, and they're in front of a boarded up bar that smells of blood. The neon sign reads 'The Red Stag' with four letters out, and Sam doesn't need Mallika to tell him this is the place. They can't think about what they might find inside, can't think about where the smell of blood is coming from, so they don't.There will be a secret entrance somewhere, but they don't have the time, so they tear down the door, her claws and his fists and Dean is there, tied to a chair and bleeding, in front of him a tall, misshapen figure.

As it turns, Sam raises Dad's revolver and fires twice.

When they get back, shaken and immersed in Sam's victory and Mallika's glory, John is surrounded by booze and snoring on the couch. He hasn't noticed his son's absence, and they're not going to tell him. After all, Sam is only ten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Riva is a French name I liked. The meaning isn't why I chose it, but it means 'from the shore', apparently.
> 
> Mallika is an Arabic name that means 'queen'.


End file.
